This is interesting, and I don’t recall if I posted it when I found it several weeks ago. The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy has AWB listed in a homework assignment in a class called, The 21st Century Digital Information Fluency Project.
Blog Evaluation Assessment
Starting with Joyce Valenza’s ideas for evaluating blogs, here’s a way to measure students’ skills at online evaluation. Besides the question categories, all that’s needed is a blog to evaluate and rubrics by which to measure proficiency.
1. Joyce’s original questions:
Who is the blogger? With so many blogs offering spotty or nonexistent “about” pages, this may be a clue in itself.
What sorts of materials is the blogger reading or citing?
Does this blogger have influence? Is the blog well-established? Who and how many people link to the blog? Who is commenting? Does this blog appear to be part of a community? (The best blogs are likely to be hubs for folks who share interests with the blogger.) Tools like Technorati http://technorati.com and Blogpulse http://blogpulse.com can help learners assess the influence of a blog.
Is this content covered in any depth, with any authority?
How sophisticated is the language, the spelling?
Is this blog alive? It there a substantial archive? How current are the posts?
At what point in a story’s lifetime did a post appear? Examining a story’s date may offer clues as to the reliability of a blog entry.
Is the site upfront about its bias? Does it recognize/discuss other points of view? (For certain information tasks–an essay or debate–bias may be especially useful. Students need to recognize it.)
If the blogger is not a traditional “expert,” is this a first-hand view that would also be valuable for research? Is it a unique perspective?
2. Select a blog and evaluate it yourself.
Below are some suggestions that can serve as evaluation test cases. Blogs often change daily, so these may not be as interesting or appropriate to evaluate as they were on Dec. 7, 2006–the day we first examined them. Feel free to substitute others that are related to your subject matter. Search for content or related key concepts in Technorati, Google Blog Search, Blogpulse, etc. If the content isn’t important, search for “conspiracy theory” and you’re sure to find some interesting posts (which you must approve before turning students loose on them!). Keep in mind the rubrics below as you search for answers to evaluate the blog you select.
Too funny. You can read the rest here.
AWB
Last 5 posts by AWB
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